The proposed research is part of a longitudinal study that examines outcomes of children with otitis media (OM). The broad goals of the larger study are to use more sophisticated procedures to document children's hearing and middle ear functioning, to measure factors (e.g., ambient noise) that may exacerbate children's inability to hear during periods of OM-related hearing loss, and to document quality of care, both in the home and daycare, and its effects on children's outcomes. The contribution of the proposed research focuses on a fine-grained analysis of children's language abilities and parental interaction styles at 12 and 24 months. This research project provides a unique opportunity to examine microlevel language processes in a subgroup of children (i.e., children with OM) for which little is known about their language development. Participants in this study consist of a randomized sample from a larger cohort of children stratified for the presence of chronic OM. Mother- father-child language samples will be videotaped in children's homes at 12 and 24 months and analyzed for children';s syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic abilities and for parental interaction styles. Early communicative intents and conversational breakdowns will be examined in children with chronic OM and children without chronic OM using analysis of variance (ANOVA) and multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA), respectively. Mothers' input styles (e.g., clarification requests and amount of joint focused attention) with children who have chronic OM and children without chronic OM will be examined using an ANOVA. A similar analysis will be used for fathers' input styles. Multiple regression analysis will be used to investigate the main effects of OM, parental input, and the OM x parental input interaction on children's language development.